Philip Kerr - Field Grey

I first met Captain Gunther in Paris, in July 1940. The meeting took place at the Hotel du Louvre, or possibly the HQ of the French Gestapo at 100 Avenue Henry-Martin. Other officers present at this meeting included Herbert Hagen and Karl Bomelburg. Gunther had arrived in Paris as the special emissary of SS General Reinhardt Heydrich and he was ordered to track down a number of French and German communists who were wanted by the Nazi government back in Berlin. Gunther struck me as typical of the type who found favour with Heydrich: cynical, ruthless and not at all a gentlemen. He made clear his own detestation of the French and, in spite of my efforts to rein him in, he insisted on flying to the south of France and collecting a detachment of motorised SS to drive him to Gurs and Le Vernet, to search those two camps for Heydrich's wanted men.

It was my own feeling there was nothing to be lost by delaying matters until the end of summer, largely out of sensitivity to the defeated armies of France. But Gunther was most insistent. He was ill, I recall – I don't remember why, but later on there was talk of his involvement with a Swiss prostitute – but, in spite of this, he still travelled south to carry out his mission, to which Heydrich had given top priority. In fairness to Captain Gunther, it may have been this illness that prompted his summary action in regard to the prisoners. He was accompanied by another German officer, Hauptsturmfuhrer Paul Kestner, and it was he who informed me of what had happened on the road from Gurs to Lourdes.

Almost a dozen men were arrested in Gurs. Among these was the head of the French communist party in Le Havre, Lucien Roux. It seems terrible to think it, but apparently these men knew what Captain Gunther had in store for them. The SS drove a few kilometres out of Gurs and stopped in a forest clearing. There Gunther ordered everyone out of the trucks. The prisoners were lined up, offered a last cigarette and then shot. Gunther delivered the coup de grace to several men who showed signs of life and then they all went on their way, leaving the bodies where they fell.

Frankly, when Captain Kestner told me exactly what had happened down there I thought seriously about making a formal complaint against Captain Gunther; but I was advised against it: Gunther was Heydrich's man and this made him all but untouchable, you understand. Even when he murdered another officer at a brothel in Paris and it might reasonably have been expected that Gunther would be court-martialled, he managed to evade all charges. He was merely recalled to Berlin, from where he was immediately dispatched to the Ukraine, most likely to carry out the kind of dirty work for which the SS is now notorious. It's not given to every German officer to behave like a gentleman.

Later on, I met Heydrich and expressed my own reservations about Gunther, and his response was typical of the man. He said that he rather agreed with Schopenhauer that all honour ultimately rests on considerations of expediency. Heydrich was of course strongly influenced by Schopenhauer; and I don't just mean his anti-Semitism. Anyway, I didn't argue with him. That was never wise. Like Kant, I believe that honour and morality contain their own imperatives. And this is of course why I was part of Count Stauffenberg's plot to kill Adolf Hitler. And why I was arrested by the Nazis in July 1944.

Helmut Knochen, interviewed May 1954

My name is Helmut Knochen and I have been asked to provide a description of SS Hauptsturmf u hrer Bernhard Gunther, for the record. I met Gunther in 1940. He was older than me, I think. Perhaps forty years old. I recall also that he was a Berliner. I myself am from Magdeburg and I have always had a fascination for the Berlin accent. Well it wasn't so much his accent that marked him out as a Berliner as his manner. This might be described as rude and uncompromising; cynical and unfriendly. It's no wonder that Hitler disliked Berlin so much. Well, this man Gunther was doubly typical because he was also a policeman. A detective. I always think that the character of Doubting Thomas in the Bible must have been a Berliner. This fellow would only have believed Christ had risen from the dead if he could have looked through the holes in his hands and feet and seen a judge and a research physicist on the other side.

He was very German-looking. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, about one ninety centimetres tall and powerful in the arms and shoulders, even a little heavy. His face was pugnacious. Yes, he was very much the kind of man I didn't like at all. A real Nazi, you know?

[The witness, Knochen, was subsequently shown a photograph of a man and positively identified him as the wanted war criminal, Bernhard Gunther.]

From the grimy window in the holding cell at Paris's Cherche-Midi prison I could just see the front of the Hotel Lutetia, and for a long while I stood pressed into the cobwebbed corner, watching the hotel closely as if I almost expected to see myself coming out of the door with poor little Renata Matter on my arm. It was hard to know who I felt more sorry for, her or me, but eventually she edged it. She was dead after all, when she would have had every reason to expect that she might still be alive. But for me. I didn't spare myself anything in the way of reproach or blame. If only I hadn't fixed her up with a job at the Adlon, I told myself, then she wouldn't have been killed. If only I had left her here in Paris, then there would have been a small but nonetheless real possibility that she could have turned left out of the Lutetia, crossed the Boulevard Raspail, and come to see me in the Cherche-Midi. It would have been easy enough. The Cherche-Midi was, after all, no longer a prison but a court, and like many others in Paris – most of them journalists – she might have gone there to see the trial of Carl Oberg and Helmut Knochen and seen me there, too. My hosts in the SDECE – the French counterespionage service – had thought it necessary to remind me that I was in their power, and that like Dreyfus, who had also been imprisoned in the Cherche-Midi, they could do what they liked with me now that I had been extradited to their custody.

Not that custody in Paris was such an enormous hardship. Not after everything else. Not after Mainz and the French Surete. They had been a little rough. And it was true that La Sante Prison where I was currently held wasn't exactly the Lutetia, but the SDECE wasn't so bad. Probably not as bad as the CIA, anyway; and certainly not as bad as the Russians. Besides, the food at La Sante was good and the coffee even better; the cigarettes were tasty and plentiful; and most of the interrogations at the Caserne Mortier – nicknamed the Swimming Pool – were conducted politely, often with a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. Sometimes the French even gave me a newspaper to take back to La Sante. None of this was what I'd been expecting when I left WCPN1 in Landsberg. My French improved – enough to understand what was in the newspapers and a little of the proceedings on the day I went to court, which just happened to be the day when the military tribunal brought in its verdict and handed down the sentences. My hosts in French intelligence had a point they wanted to make after all. I could hardly blame them for that.

We sat in the public gallery, which was full. A civil judge, M. Boessel du Bourg, and six military judges came into court and took their places in front of a large blackboard, so that I half expected them to write out the verdict and sentence with a piece of chalk. The civil judge wore robes and an extremely silly hat. The military judges were all wearing lots of medals, although it was unclear to me what any of these could have been for. Then the two accused were led into the dock. I hadn't seen Oberg before except on the German newsreels during the war. He wore a smart, double-breasted pinstripe suit and light- framed glasses. He looked like Eisenhower's older brother. Knochen was thinner and greyer than I remembered: prison does that to a man – that and a death sentence from the British hanging over your head. Knochen looked straight at me without showing a sign of recognition. I wanted to shout at him that he was a damned liar, but of course I didn't. When a man's on trial for his life it's not good manners to bend his ear about something else.